The Abbey Road medley is the musical equivalent of goulash. It’s made with a little bit of everything, including leftover tracks from the White Album and Let It Be sessions, most of which were written by Paul McCartney. It’s also notable because “The End” contains Ringo Starr’s only drum solo as a Beatle. Meaning, because Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be, Ringo had to wait until the penultimate Beatles song to show off his skills…on a song called “The End.”

And now that someone has removed all those pesky instruments from the medley, leaving only Paul and John’s vocals, it’s as if Ringo’s greatest accomplishment never happened. He is the Charlie Brown of people.

It’s not like Ringo was forced to “wait” for that song. He didn’t like drum solos and never really desired to show off his particular skill set. Yeah, Ringo, was the least talented Beatle, but I’m tired of people acting like he wasn’t talented at all. He chose his place in the band, one that he was happy with, and committed to it. That’s his greatest accomplishment.

It’s not that anybody “left” them in, really. It’s that they’re embedded on one of the vocal tracks on the multitrack tape (or, at least, on the Rock Band version of the multitrack, which is where all these isolated-this-and-thats have been coming from lately).

Oh, no, don’t let me ruin the magic — that wasn’t my point! I was just explaining how these things come to be.

Basically, the Rock Band game is built using various songs’ original multitrack recordings, so that the individual parts can then be “matched” by the game player. Hackers have figured out to get in there and extract these individual tracks, which then get disseminated across the web. Music geeks then spend countless joyful hours messing around with them, making their own mixes, etc.

That’s where this “Abbey Road” stuff came from, for instance.

Hit YouTube and you’ll find plenty of it out there, including lots of other isolated Beatles tracks.